I've fought for my my grades (from orange up) with Judo Scotland. I think its a good system although there could be more distinction between the kyu grades up to brown.

It seems JS is going to go down the technical route that the BJA has taken. I don't understand why you can't keep the competitive kyu gradings and just enforce stricter theory requirements on everyone.

People who train under the BJA don't have to fight for belts anymore although one way to pass the black belt grading is to collect points from winning fights. You have to a do technical grading instead.

Marketing in judo seems to be lacking, if I tell a non martial Artist about judo they usually reply with something about judo chops. Local karate dojo's and BJJ clubs advertise heavily and print their results in the local paper. The judo club does nothing apart from have a sign outside during lessons. To be honest if the local BJJ club trained decent takedown regularly the I'd be doing BJJ instead of judo.

Ive been to a few different clubs locally to me and none of them really explain the fundamentals of judo very well. I was two years into judo and had never been shown or even heard of principles like j'uks tsurikomi and the triangle, when I questioned him about it he said its a basic principle of judo. Surely I should have been shown this instead of reading it in the Internet.

People who train under the BJA don't have to fight for belts anymore although one way to pass the black belt grading is to collect points from winning fights. You have to a do technical grading instead.

Marketing in judo seems to be lacking, if I tell a non martial Artist about judo they usually reply with something about judo chops. Local karate dojo's and BJJ clubs advertise heavily and print their results in the local paper. The judo club does nothing apart from have a sign outside during lessons. To be honest if the local BJJ club trained decent takedown regularly the I'd be doing BJJ instead of judo.

Ive been to a few different clubs locally to me and none of them really explain the fundamentals of judo very well. I was two years into judo and had never been shown or even heard of principles like j'uks tsurikomi and the triangle, when I questioned him about it he said its a basic principle of judo. Surely I should have been shown this instead of reading it in the Internet.

And this is just the start

adskibullus I agree the marketing and general view of judo is terrible.
As far as BJJ goes i found from my limited experince that they expected you to go in and learn as you roll instead of what judo did which was teach me the ABC of rolling which i thought was much better for me.

I have not heard of any of those 3 principles yet and i am 1 year in, should i be asking about them?

In many ways Judo has marketing that many sports would die for. We are part of the world's greatest sporting spectacle and thus have a global profile at the highest level.

This gives the name 'Judo' incredible brand recognition, everyone's heard of Judo, even if they don't know what exactly it is.

There's also Austin Powers with his 'Judo chop', which is silly, but useful in a way, because it gives people something to say in response to you mentioning Judo.

Powers' Judo chop is of course a homage to the Bond of Connery/Moore era who was always using Ippon seoi nage and Tomoe nage to fight bad guys. Linking Judo to James Bond acts of badassery is also a good selling point.

The issue is of course not that the brand of Judo struggles for marketing. Its that individual clubs are often terrible at marketing themselves.

**** websites or even worse no website at all. No regular updating of contact details, session times and important changes such as venue etc...

The reason most clubs are terrible at marketing themselves is that they're run by amateur coaches who run clubs on the side, for the love of the sport.

This gets to the very heart of the issue with British Judo from which everything else stems - poor quality coaching.

The grass roots level coaching in the UK is abysmal, from a technical viewpoint. Coaching qualifications are too easy to obtain and fundamentally do not equip people to coach effectively.

This lack of technical proficiency and coaching ability feeds into all the other problems: over emphasis on kids and kids competitions, randori as a fight to the death, over emphasis on grip fighting, obsession with 'contest versions' instead of basics and a completely unstructured approach to beginner development.

Until coaching is fixed nothing else will improve. However, this of course raises the issue, that if the thing holding back British Judo is actually the people who are teaching Judo across the country. How the hell do you improve it?

Originally Posted by Hollykate

I have not heard of any of those 3 principles yet and i am 1 year in, should i be asking about them?

You should have been taught them. Maybe you have just under different names. If not, then well it just goes to prove everything I talked about re: poor coaching.

In many ways Judo has marketing that many sports would die for. We are part of the world's greatest sporting spectacle and thus have a global profile at the highest level.

This gives the name 'Judo' incredible brand recognition, everyone's heard of Judo, even if they don't know what exactly it is.

There's also Austin Powers with his 'Judo chop', which is silly, but useful in a way, because it gives people something to say in response to you mentioning Judo.

Powers' Judo chop is of course a homage to the Bond of Connery/Moore era who was always using Ippon seoi nage and Tomoe nage to fight bad guys. Linking Judo to James Bond acts of badassery is also a good selling point.

The issue is of course not that the brand of Judo struggles for marketing. Its that individual clubs are often terrible at marketing themselves.

**** websites or even worse no website at all. No regular updating of contact details, session times and important changes such as venue etc...

The reason most clubs are terrible at marketing themselves is that they're run by amateur coaches who run clubs on the side, for the love of the sport.

This gets to the very heart of the issue with British Judo from which everything else stems - poor quality coaching.

The grass roots level coaching in the UK is abysmal, from a technical viewpoint. Coaching qualifications are too easy to obtain and fundamentally do not equip people to coach effectively.

This lack of technical proficiency and coaching ability feeds into all the other problems: over emphasis on kids and kids competitions, randori as a fight to the death, over emphasis on grip fighting, obsession with 'contest versions' instead of basics and a completely unstructured approach to beginner development.

Until coaching is fixed nothing else will improve. However, this of course raises the issue, that if the thing holding back British Judo is actually the people who are teaching Judo across the country. How the hell do you improve it?

You should have been taught them. Maybe you have just under different names. If not, then well it just goes to prove everything I talked about re: poor coaching.